In a landmark ruling in May 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) established a "right to be forgotten", or more accurately, a “right to delist”, allowing Europeans to ask search engines to delist certain links from results they show based on searches for that person’s name. We moved rapidly to comply with the ruling from the Court. Within weeks we made it possible for people to submit removal requests, and soon after that began delisting search results.

It's now just over a year later and we’ve evaluated and processed more than a quarter of a million requests to delist links to more than one million individual web pages. Whenever a request meets the criteria set by the Court for removal (which are that the information can be deemed inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant or excessive, and not in the public interest) we delist it from search results for that individual’s name from all European versions of Google Search.

However, earlier this summer, France’s data protection regulator, the CNIL, sent us a formal notice ordering us to delist links not just from all European versions of Search but also from all versions globally. That means a removal request by an individual in France, if approved, would not only be removed from google.fr and other European versions of Google Search, but from all versions of Google Search around the world.

This is a troubling development that risks serious chilling effects on the web.

While the right to be forgotten may now be the law in Europe, it is not the law globally. Moreover, there are innumerable examples around the world where content that is declared illegal under the laws of one country, would be deemed legal in others: Thailand criminalizes some speech that is critical of its King, Turkey criminalizes some speech that is critical of Ataturk, and Russia outlaws some speech that is deemed to be “gay propaganda."

If the CNIL’s proposed approach were to be embraced as the standard for Internet regulation, we would find ourselves in a race to the bottom. In the end, the Internet would only be as free as the world’s least free place.

We believe that no one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access. We also believe this order is disproportionate and unnecessary, given that the overwhelming majority of French internet users—currently around 97%—access a European version of Google’s search engine like google.fr, rather than Google.com or any other version of Google.

As a matter of principle, therefore, we respectfully disagree with the CNIL’s assertion of global authority on this issue and we have asked the CNIL to withdraw its Formal Notice.

We have worked hard to strike the right balance in our implementation of the European Court’s ruling and have maintained a collaborative dialogue with the CNIL and other data protection authorities, who agree with our decisions in the majority of cases referred to them. We are committed to continuing to work with regulators in this open and transparent way.

Throughout history, Europe has been a hotbed of culture, imagination and natural beauty. At Google we’re keen to share these elements with the world through our maps, so over recent months we’ve been taking all manner of Street View technologies—Trekkers, Trolleys and tripods—to capture some incredible places across the continent, focusing this time on Central and Eastern Europe. Here are a few highlights for you to explore:

Hungary
Floating down the Danube river in summertime is a wonderful thing. But now you can also check out some of Hungary’s hidden gems in Google Maps. Take a look inside the National Theatre of Pécs and explore the beautiful Basilica of Eger, the second largest church in the country. In the capital, Budapest, you can walk among the trees and rose bushes in the little-known but spectacular botanical garden near the centre of town, or even climb a hill to get away from it all.

Romania
And finally, sink 100 meters deep into one of the most breathtaking places beneath the earth: the Turda Salt Mine, in Cluj County, Romania. Tourists around the world can take a tour of the mine—which is more than 200 years old—with our high-resolution imagery, from the comfort of their homes.

Turda Salt Mine, Romania

We hope you enjoy discovering some of the delights of Europe as much as we did.

Earlier today, David Drummond, Google's Senior Vice President of Corporate Development, spoke to editors and news industry executives at the annual GEN Summit, in Barcelona. In his speech, posted in full below, he detailed Google's commitment to working with the news industry to support high quality journalism through technology and innovation.

Thank you for that kind introduction. I’m delighted to be back in Barcelona and to speak for the first time at a Global Editors Network summit.

The last time I gave a major speech at a news industry event was nearly five years ago - that was at the World Association of Newspapers conference in Hyderabad. I’m sure some of you were there.

In preparing for today I took a look back at that speech. Here’s a little of what I said.

“Imagine we're in 2015, and [this phone] is a piece of technology which delivers me my news."

"I can flip through my favorite papers and magazines without a frustrating wait for each new page to load. Even better, it knows who I am, what I like and what I've already read. So the stories that appear are tailored to my interests and needs."

"There’s an interesting piece in Egypt's Al-Ahram, translated automatically from Arabic to English. A story pops up about great restaurants in Hyderabad. I tap my finger on the screen, to tell the computer it got that bit right!"

"Some of these stories will be part of my monthly news subscription package. Some - where the free preview draws me in - will cost a few pennies billed to my account. Others will be free, paid for by advertisements.”

NOT BAD - if I say so myself!

It sounded a bit like science fiction just five years ago, but most if not quite all of that has come to pass. For the user consuming news online, the advances of the last five years have been truly momentous. The lightning fast move to mobile has challenged us all. And the quality and ambition of journalism just seems to get higher every year.

But you don’t need me to tell you that the road to sustainable models for journalism remains work in progress

I concluded that speech by encouraging publishers to work with Google, not without us - or against us.

That’s also work in progress!

Unfortunately here in Spain, we’ve had some ups and downs. The ‘all or nothing’ nature of the copyright law led us to close Google News here — lose-lose for everyone, and one of the saddest decisions I’ve had to make at Google. But we haven’t given up. We continue to talk with publisher groups and the government and I hope we can bring it back in the future.

Today I want to talk in a little more detail about how we are working with the news industry in 2015 and how we intend to work with you in the years ahead.

And why. At Google, we believe fundamentally in information, and the role that free flowing information plays in strengthening democracies and economies around the world. Journalism is a vital part of that and we want to play our role in making sure high quality journalism has a sustainable future.

In April we announced the Digital News Initiative, a partnership between Google and news publishers in Europe to support quality journalism through technology and innovation. Today I want to give you an update on the progress we are making.

Less than two months ago we started out with eleven partners, including our hosts here - the Global Editors Network - the Guardian in the UK, Die Zeit in Germany, Les Echos in France and El Pais in Spain. I’m very pleased to say that they have now been joined by more than 65 new participants and we have received over 1000 expressions of interest from across Europe. We invite others to join us.

We are working together in three key areas - on product development, on training and research, and on supporting innovation in digital news.

First: product development.

We agree with news publishers that this is THE crucial area if we are to build more sustainable business models together. It won’t be a simple or quick fix but I believe we really have an historic opportunity to help shape the future of this industry in a way which can ensure the survival of high quality journalism online and which will provide an ever-better service for readers.

It will take time, but our Engineering and Product leaders are already engaged in detailed thinking with a working group of publishers on a set of priorities including video, mobile and monetisation.

I can’t yet tell you what they will achieve, but is great to see some of the greatest practitioners in journalism sitting down for the first time with some of the best brains at Google to figure out how our industries can work more productively together. I’ve been party to some of those conversations and I can tell you that the level of commitment on both sides is sky high.

So stay tuned for product developments.

The second pillar of our partnership is in Training and Research. Through our newly established News Lab at Google our programme of newsroom training workshops - with a dedicated European team - is already well underway.

By the end of this year we will have worked with ten thousand journalists around the world, through newsroom trainings and partnerships with such groups as the European Journalism Centre, the International News Media Association and the Global Editors Network.

At Google we like the joke that goes: “In God we Trust, all others must bring data.” For the past four years we’ve partnered with GEN on the Data Journalism Awards to encourage the growth of this highly promising area of journalism. It has been an inspiring journey through a discipline that was almost unknown 5 years ago - and last night’s awards ceremony was a terrific showcase of some of the most engaging examples. Congratulations to the winners!

We’ve always felt that Google’s aggregated search data has the potential to be a great source of raw material for journalists. In May for example, our search data showed that the British were gripped by two things above all others - the General Election...and the Eurovision Song Contest! What did we learn? Well, first - that an awful lot of people were wondering: why is Australia taking part in the Eurovision Song Contest!

But more importantly, Google Trends confounded the pollsters and successfully predicted that Prime Minister David Cameron would win the election.

After consultation with dozens of journalists about how the platform could be even more useful, we’ve just undertaken a major revamp of Google Trends. We’ve improved the depth, comprehensiveness, and speed of our tools - launching real time Google Trends for the first time. It’s well worth a look and you can see it demonstrated at the Google Trends Booth at the EXPO.

Turning to Research, I’m delighted to say that the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, which we support under the DNI, has just launched its 2015 edition covering 12 countries. It’s full of great statistics and analysis of how the digital news landscape is changing in Europe. And over the next year it will grow to cover 20 countries, making it the most comprehensive picture of how European readers are consuming and absorbing their news.

We have also been busy gathering proposals for our Computational Journalism Awards, and today we are announcing three academic research grants of 55 thousand euros each to encourage collaboration between computer science and journalism at universities in Europe. Congratulations to the researchers at the University of Hamburg, INRIA in Paris, and London’s City University who are the first recipients of these awards. These were impressive proposals with strong potential to become real-world tools for journalism.

In the weeks since we announced the kick-off of DNI, we’ve had some great conversations with key people in the news industry. For example, at an UNconference we organised in Helsinki called Newsgeist, one of the topics which was top of editors’ minds was the question of how their publications can maintain or indeed rebuild trust in this era of atomic news consumption.

In a world of native ads, user generated content and widespread sharing, how do readers know what they are reading is true, or what is the motivation of the publisher?

Based on these conversations we have committed to funding an initiative called the Trust Project, led by Markkula Center for Applied Ethics in California, which aims to propose approaches and structures to rebuild trust in online journalism. I’m delighted to say that the Trust Project has extended its pilot to include a number of prominent European news organisation, including La Stampa, Zeit Online and the BBC. And greater trust should translate into greater value.

Since we announced the Digital News Initiative there has been a good deal of interest too in the third pillar - the Innovation Fund, and I wanted to give you an update.

As you know, we have allocated 150 million euros to stimulating and supporting innovation in digital journalism within the news industry in Europe. The ambition and intent of the Fund is bold: to spark new thinking, which could come from anywhere in the news ecosystem, to give news organisations - of all sizes - the space to try some new things. This is a complicated task and we are in the process of setting up the governance structure for the fund. We want to take the appropriate time and diligence to get this right, and make the process transparent and equitable. We’ll announce the details of the submission process in September.

So what kind of proposals are we looking for? In short, the emphasis will be on the experimental and - we hope - the impactful. We want to see genuinely new ideas from those engaged in the day-to-day practice of journalism with the potential to transform the way we all think of digital news.

We encourage you to think broadly about ideas, rather than the levels of funding - sometimes small, scrappier ideas are enough to get things moving faster than larger, more costly projects. And, as we did with the French fund, at the higher end of investment we will ask that participants share the risk by investing some of their own money as well.

Anyone working on innovation in online news in Europe will be able to apply, including national and regional publishers, new players and pure players. And one final thought on this - perhaps this would be a great area for news organisations to come together to submit joint proposals as there are many ideas that affect the whole ecosystem and collaboration can benefit everyone involved.

Finally, I want to say a word about a subject close to my heart - press freedom. This year, we’ve seen journalists kidnapped and killed while working in the service of providing the world information. And these threats go beyond the physical world: digital threats of surveillance, account hacking, and website attacks have have become a common weapon of oppressors around the world. While Google is not in a position to help guard against physical attacks, we are in a position it protect journalists from digital attacks, and so reduce the chilling effects of those threats.

Over the last year we have quietly operated an experiment called Project Shield to protect hundreds of news sites around the world from attacks aimed at censoring them by taking them offline. We do this by putting Google’s considerable computing power between the attackers and independent media sites to help them stay up in times of crisis when they're needed most.

Project Shield has protected more than 250 at-risk sites in more than 50 countries. For example, during last year's conflict in Ukraine, Ukrainian AND Russian media sites were facing denial of service attacks. Project Shield offered protection to news organisations on both sides, and during that two month period alone, we protected over 650 million page views from censorship. I’m proud of that and we aim to extend the scope of Project Shield.

To conclude...

These are interesting times in the relationship between the news and technology industries - perhaps even historic times.

While we have always sought to be a good partner to the news industry we have tended to operate on different paths, and sometimes the dialogue has either been of the deaf - or of the megaphone.

I - and the Product leaders who build and run Google services - are determined to change that. We recognise that technology companies and news organisations are part of the same information ecosystem. We are committed to playing our part.

And of course it is not just Google.

Facebook, Apple, Twitter and others are also engaged in initiatives aimed at working more closely with publishers and helping to re-imagine the future of news. We compete fiercely with those companies day in day out, but as some have observed, if tech companies are competing to outdo each other in how they work with news publishers, what’s not to like about that?

As the great playwright Arthur Miller put it: “A good newspaper... is a nation talking to itself”. Today we are not just talking to ourselves, but talking WITH each other. Long may the conversation continue.

Journalism is evolving fast in the digital age, and researchers across Europe are working on exciting projects to create innovative new tools and open source software that will support online journalism and benefit readers. And so as part of the wider Google Digital News Initiative (DNI), we invited academic researchers across Europe to submit proposals for the Computational Journalism Research Awards.

After careful review by Google’s News Lab and Research teams, the following projects were selected:

SCAN: Systematic Content Analysis of User Comments for JournalistsWalid Maalej, Professor of Informatics, University of HamburgWiebke Loosen, Senior Researcher for Journalism, Hans-Bredow-Institute, Hamburg, Germany
This project aims at developing a framework for the systematic, semi-automated analysis of audience feedback on journalistic content to better reflect the voice of users, mitigate the analysis efforts, and help journalists generate new content from the user comments.

Event Thread Extraction for Viewpoint AnalysisIoana Manolescu, Senior Researcher, INRIA Saclay, France
The goal of the project is to automatically build topic "event threads" that will help journalists and citizens decode claims made by public figures, in order to distinguish between personal opinion, communication tools and voluntary distortions of the reality.

Computational Support for Creative Story Development by JournalistsNeil Maiden, Professor of Systems Engineering George Brock, Professor of Journalism, City University London, UK
This project will develop a new software prototype to implement creative search strategies that journalists could use to strengthen investigative storytelling more efficiently than with current news content management and search tools.

We congratulate the recipients of these awards and we look forward to the results of their research. Each award includes funding of up to $60,000 in cash and $20,000 in computing credits on Google’s Cloud Platform. Stay tuned for updates on their progress.

It’s hard to believe it’s been just 10 years since the founders of YouTube recorded a grainy video in front of an elephant enclosure — and subsequently changed the world. The video itself was unremarkable, but their idea was powerfully simple: broadcast yourself.

A decade of sharing European creativity is definitely something worth celebrating - and that’s what we did last night, at BOZAR, the Centre for Fine Arts, in Brussels. If you missed Les Twins on stage last night, you can see them in action here. Larry and Laurent Bourgeois are identical twins from Sarcelles, France. A single video on YouTube took them from the suburbs of Paris to international stardom, touring with Beyoncé and Cirque du Soleil. They have more than 12 million views on their YouTube channel.

Les Twins from France demonstrated their talents at Europe on Stage

From up and coming young musicians to world-leading European cultural institutions such as Madrid’s Prado Museum or the Berlin Philharmonic, thousands of creators are reaching new audiences online with their videos.

To celebrate its 60th anniversary this year, the Eurovision Song Contest streamed its shows live on YouTube, globally, for the first time. We think that's worth douze points :-) -- and so do almost 100 European TV channels who have partnered with YouTube to find new fans all over the planet.

Every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and around a quarter of that time is spent watching videos made by European creators. There are hundreds of YouTube channels across the European Union that make six-figure sums a year from adverts shown next to their content. What's more our partner revenue increased by over 50% per year for each of the last years.

Google’s Matt Brittin said that YouTube is a growth engine for European creativity and culture.

Europe has helped make YouTube what it is today and we can’t wait to see what it has to share with the world in the next 10 years.

Today is International Museum Day and it's been four years since we launched Google Art Project. Since then we’ve worked closely with hundreds of museums and partners around the world to bring art online while supporting their mission to encourage cultural exchange across the globe.

A great way to celebrate this special day with us is to download the Google Art Project Chrome extension. Launched a few weeks ago, this extension allows you to discover a work of art from our partners each time you open a new browser tab.

Whether browsing from home or the office, you’ll see masterpieces ranging from Van Gogh’s Landscape at Saint-Rémy and João Baptista de Costa’s Gruta Azul, all the way to contemporary works from street artists around the world. With the Google Art Project Chrome extension, you can turn each new tab into a journey through the world’s cultural heritage.

To learn more about the artwork, the artist or the museum showcased in your browser, just click on the lower left hand corner of the image to explore it on the Google Cultural Institute platform. Happy browsing!

This week marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. As time passes, and memories fade, it’s important to remember both the sacrifices made and the remarkable stories of the period. That’s why the Google Cultural Institute has partnered with twenty-seven museums and institutions around the world to bring more than 1400 rare and important world war-related artifacts online.

Each of our partner institutions is a custodian of vital national heritage, preserving important stories and artifacts from the war years. Now, using tools provided by the Google Cultural Institute, expert curators have brought to life a wide range of remarkable and inspiring online exhibitions that demonstrate the bravery, ingenuity and sacrifice of those who fought - and those whose lives were changed forever by the war.